Liz Polanski

Name: Liz Polanski Gender: Female Age: 18 Grade: 12 School: Bayview Secondary School Hobbies and Interests: Mathematics, baseball, dealing drugs.

Appearance: Liz is a five foot, one inch, one hundred pound goth girl. Her hair is cut short, dyed black, and brushed choppy, and she has three holes in one ear, two holes in the other, and a place in her nose for a stud. A dragon tattoo peeks around both shoulders, visible under sheer jerseys and tank tops. In dress, she favors black sweatshirts, discomfiting goth gear, and pockets. Right now, she's wearing a pocketed, pleated miniskirt, ripped fishnet tights, banged-up black combat boots (they're a size seven, she's a size six; she stuffs them with old socks to make up the extra room), a black, metal-zipper sweatshirt and a black tshirt that says (in white text, over her breasts) "Who the hell do you think I am?".

Biography: Morally, socially and stylistically, Liz Polanski keeps to a drum of her own, an no one has yet figured out what the beat is. She doesn't seem to deal in anything resembling traditional morality--she smokes Camels, drinks heavily, deals in soft drugs, and sleeps with any guy who will have her--but sometimes she'll do some stupid brave thing and that's the only time anyone likes her. Like take the time in fourth grade, when she sat in an oak tree (climbed out the art room window to get there) for a day and a half, rather then let it get cut down with a nest of owls in the trunk. Or all those times she would suddenly, surprisingly, tell some feared teacher or popular bully he/she/it was a dick--and exactly how and why, in no small terms. The rest of the time, she's just a bitch. Maybe it's because she was picked on so much in elementary and middle school, but she now takes a positive delight in exposing people's gamey friendships and predatory hypocrisies. No one likes inviting her to their parties--she lurks and skulks and listens in and never talks unless she's spilling secrets in the most embarrassing way possible--but they put up with her because of the drugs she bears. And lonely boys like sleeping with her. She's cute, in a gothy way. Go figure.

Well-meaning people have occasionally tried to befriend her, reform her. It never works. She's too prickly for that. Perhaps it's because she didn't have much of a family. Her father left her mother as soon as she got pregnant, and her mother was never really all there even when she _was_ there; a bit batty, a bit flaky, more than a little depressive, with a gimpy left leg and migraines to boot. The mother worked bad jobs at long hours, and came back late, shut herself in her room, barricading herself against the hard of the day. The girl-child she had came tiny and learned quickly--learned, at four, to climb the counters and make herself peanut butter and crackers for dinner, at five to use her mother's welfare check to buy food at the local Tiger Mart, at six how to sew, buy clothes, kill cockroaches, and go to school.

School was difficult. Six-year-olds are a nasty bunch, and for little Liz, whose socialization until then had been primarily with the Chinese cashier at the Tiger Mart, people proved nearly impossible. They were enigmas, they were strange, they made fun of her ugly clothes. They made fun of her for not knowing things. She tried clawing their eyes out, but that didn't work so well.

Math saved her. It made sense. Immediately. It stayed clear, the way people didn't. It was full of systems that spanned up and down, that clicked in her head. That took logical progressions, even when the teachers didn't explain them. She didn't understand what difficulty her classmates were having. She raised her hand one too many times. The kids laughed at her again. Liz hated being laughed at. The teacher gave her the textbook and told her to sit at the back of the class. To do the problems in the next section. To read. Liz read. She did all of the problems. The teacher looked troubled. Liz was shuttled to another math class. The teacher there was Mr. Kwong. He seemed thrilled to have Liz in his class. He didn't care that she wore filthy clothes day after day, or spoke in a near-monotone. He gave her more problems. She answered them. He was thrilled.

He told her to socialize. She didn't listen. She was terrified of people. Her throat caught like sickness when she tried to talk to them. They wore shiny new clothing, and lived in houses that didn't smell and did foreign things like movies and bowling. The amount of money it took to get into a movie seemed, to Liz, to be tremendous. She lived on spare change and peanut butter crackers and the occasional head of lettuce. Sometimes her mother would get a burst of energy and decide, suddenly, to cook three-layer lasagna or rotisserie chicken. Liz hated those nights. The food would come out mushy and half-cooked, and her mother would break a plate and tell Liz she was a horrible mother and retreat to the room with the sloppy food still cold. At least they would have a lot of leftovers after that.

The men next door to her mother's apartment started offering her spare change to do things. Pick up this odd-smelling package, buy milk sugar at the Tiger Mart, deliver this tiny bag of grass to the man two blocks over. Older Liz learned this was drug dealing. She also learned she could get more money for it. She started hanging around with a gang of veteran drug dealers, tattooed men all, who didn't mind her strange silences or her awkward emotions. They were too old for that stuff. They liked a reliable kid who could sneak where they couldn't, who could calculate percentages in her head, a watchman who never stopped watching. She liked them too. They were camaraderie. They were friends.

Now she hangs out with the dealers who live around her apartment, buying their quinine, calculating percentages in her head and dealing their dime bags at school. She's grown a prickly sort of pride, but still doesn't seem to like anyone around her. She'll talk, but snarkily. Something between being half-raised by a demanding math teacher and being actually raised by small-time dealers (all while acting the adult around her mother) has made her anti-social to the extreme at school, watchful, scornful, pragmatic and predatory. Also sneaky; she's a deal at not being noticed, improbably, and a devil in any sufficiently large game of capture-the-flag.

Mr. Kwong said--and she has to believe Mr. Kwong--that this isn't how her life was meant to be. That someday she would go to University, that she wouldn't be the only smart, awkward one like this, that plenty of people had her problems, that college was a place where you could live in free dorms, eat Billy's Pan Pizza, do math every day (all the time, if you wanted) and meet people at night who you didn't scare. She wanted it so badly she could taste it.

Her one foray into the world of high-school socialization--besides sulking around and occasionally making people's lives an utter bitch--is her place on the high school softball team. An excellent pitcher, she has become something of a team mascot, although the friendliness ends with the game. Team activities are off-limits; she doesn't have the money, she has to take care of her mother, she has a part-time job at McDonalds, she can't stand everyone else on the team, she doesn't want to deal with them and fail.

So she stays away, and hunches her back, watches from afar, and wishes.

Advantages: She’s ruthless, sharp, pragmatic, adaptable, and untrusting. She will have no trouble adapting to a situation where her fellow students are all trying to kill her, and acting accordingly. A good pitching arm might also be an advantage. Disadvantages: A horrendously anti-social girl will have trouble making alliances, especially with much of the school bearing grudges against her. A diminutive stature might hamper her, a nicotine addiction might cripple her, and her strange morality might kill her.

Designated Number: Female Student no. 55

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Designated Weapon: Search and Rescue Knife Conclusion: This one could...actually be a contender. That's a breath of fresh air, considering the rest of this useless school. I wonder if that pitching arm could lead to some creative deaths? I guess we'll have to see!

'The above biography is as written by storyspoiler. No edits or alterations to the author's original work have been made.'

Evaluations
Handled by: storyspoiler

Kills: None

Killed By: Shot by Terrorist Matt Richards

Collected Weapons: Search and Rescue Knife (assigned weapon), Kitchen Knife (from Dave Morrison), Jericho 941F (.45 ACP) (from Kimberly Nguyen, to Brendan Wallace), Beretta PX4 Storm Pistol (from Brendan Wallace)

Allies: Garrett Hunter, Mirabelle Nesa, Jeremy Franco, Brendan Wallace

Enemies: Teo Weinstock, Nick LeMonde, Milo Taylor, Alex White, Kimberly Nguyen, Madeleine Smith

Mid-game Evaluation:

Post-Game Evaluation:

Memorable Quotes:

Threads
This is a list of threads that contain Liz, in chronological order

The Past:


 * Elizabeth

Pre-game:

No threads

V4:
 * Come & See
 * Resolve
 * Hideaway
 * The Man-slut, the Cocktease and the Lover
 * God's Unwanted Children
 * Metalcrafting
 * Faraday's Cages
 * The Girl Who Played With Fire
 * Blackout
 * The Beggar King
 * The Gully

Your Thoughts
''Whether you were a fellow handler in SOTF or just an avid reader of the site, we'd like to know what you thought about Liz Polanski. What did you like, or dislike, about the character? Let us know here!''


 * Not many people can honestly say they've pulled off an escape attempt, or even a significant setback against the terrorists - but now storyspoiler can with Liz Polanski. She had a great impact on the game, and her effect on those who interacted with her and helped her on the way will help shape v4 in an astounding way. Bravo, storyspoiler, and bravo Liz. - Inky
 * This one may take a bit to explain. Anyways, the short of it is I like Liz a lot. As a character, she's interesting because she does things that would normally be seen as unambiguously heroic, but due to her fervor and dedication she can come off as unsettling. Liz played by a different set of moral rules, which was cool because of how it interfaced with other characters. Lots of them were horrified by her actions, and she slowly came to understand why and eventually even managed to make a bit of a connection with other students, only to then lose that and, in the end, be defeated by the terrorists.

Liz was basically doomed from the second the terrorists turned up, and I think she and everyone else knew it. She made her stand because her principles said to, not because she was going to survive or bring down the game. That ship sailed the second she decided to spite Danya, and Liz at least seemed to realize it. She was willing to throw her life away for it, and in the end her fanaticism set her apart from all but one of her allies.

While Liz did a lot of stuff that was big in the plot, it's honestly not as interesting as her as a character. I'm gonna go ahead and say it's mildly unfortunate that her only pregame thread came up so long after her death; it's a good read and shines a lot of perspective on her and her actions and relationships. It's also too bad that Liz became so controversial, because that led to a whole lot of examining stuff that, in the end, was fairly secondary to the character. While Liz undoubtedly had a big impact on the game, a lot of that was fairly self-contained, and V4 had plenty of other characters who contributed to big events.

You may notice I'm not really talking about physics, or inspiration, or any of that. It's all stuuf that can be validly criticized, but it's also all stuff that can be turned around on a shockingly huge amount of the V4 cast. It wasn't, mostly because people cut other narratives a lot of slack. Having grown up around mountains, it doesn't diminish my enjoyment of Richard Han's exit that such a fall is at best vanishingly unlikely. I don't dislike Staffan and Nik Kronwall because they were inspired by something beyond SOTF. I've read the book Liz takes inspiration from, and I can easily say that she diverges rather completely from it by the end of her first post. The worst I can really complain about is that, yes, her profile has a lot of stuff that merits a serious raised eyebrow, and I think she'd've gotten a much warmer reception had that and her backstory been toned down and nothing else changed. Really, though, I like Liz, and I think she's an interesting and valuable part of V4. - MurderWeasel